While there was an approaching of the huge asteroid 7335 (1989 JA) on May 27, which is the size of the famous “Empire State Building” in New York City, there was another approach 3 days later to a smaller asteroid, the asteroid (2022 KO3), which The size of a bus.
The asteroid 7335 (1989 JA), last Friday, crossed close to the Earth and there were no fears at all of it colliding with our planet, as it passed a very safe distance.
Asteroid 7335 (1989 JA) is technically classified as “potentially dangerous”, but this does not mean that there is an imminent threat to our planet, but this classification refers to asteroids that are more than 150 meters in size, and the distance through which the asteroid approaches Earth, in addition to other factors.
As for the asteroid (2022 KO3), which is 8 meters in diameter, it passed on Monday and was at a distance of 292,000 km, the closest in the past 10 years.
This asteroid (2022 KO3) is classified as being on the list of near-Earth objects, which includes any asteroid whose orbit intersects with the Earth’s orbit.
These asteroids are closely monitored, and thanks to high-resolution observations and celestial mechanical calculations, their orbit is usually known to have a high level of accuracy.
This asteroid is much smaller than the asteroid that penetrated the sky of Russia in February 2013, which reached a diameter of 20 meters and disintegrated at a low altitude and released a very high energy that caused a shock wave in the sky that shattered the glass of buildings and human injuries due to flying glass and the arrival of small pieces of remnants That space rock to the surface of the earth in the form of meteorites.
And the “Jeddah Astronomy” says in a statement, that such approaches are exploited to learn more about asteroids, such as the nature of their formation. These objects are like a time machine from the remnants of our solar system and retain many of the secrets of that era, and they can tell us more about the origin of our planet.
In addition, monitoring the movement of the asteroid is an excellent opportunity to test the international capabilities to detect and track near-Earth objects, and to assess our ability to respond together to any real threat to any asteroid in the future.